Advance voting starts next Monday, 11th, September. Perhaps you know how you’re going to vote – perhaps you’re leaving it a bit longer to decide?
Do you ever think of those women who walked around the country asking forsupport for their call for a woman’s right to vote to be granted by Parliament? If you do, great, if you haven’t until now, welcome to the company.
We all stand on the shoulders of these women who got jeered at for their pains, called all sorts of names but heroically kept on with their demands. Finally our right to vote was granted on September 19, 1893.
This year September 19 falls on a Tuesday. Tuesday two weeks away. September 19, 1893 was a Tuesday too.
Wouldn’t it be a great thing if every woman in Aotearoa New Zealand voted on that Tuesday in 2017? All you have to do is find out where the advance voting is and go along on September 19 and cast your vote.
Do it in memory of and with respect to all those women who marched, shouted, pleaded, struggled, sang, so that you and I can go freely to lodge our vote. They wore purple, green and white ribbons. Maybe we can wear some purple, white or green too? So other people know and catch the meaning.
It’s important that you vote and equally important that you remember that until 1893 you weren’t allowed to vote. Solely because of your gender. You could be bright, hardworking, be an inventor, a scientist, a botanist, but you couldn’t vote. You could be the breadwinner for a family of four and you couldn’t vote because you were female. Whereas the male who’d deserted you and his kids in favour of the pub, was considered okay to vote because he was the right gender.
Obviously we haven’t got as far with equality as we’d like but this was the first step. Everything else we’ve achieved, and we have achieved a lot, all began to be possible because women in 1893 (building on the hard work of previous years) made it possible for us to vote.
See you on Tuesday 19th.
